All or Nothing

“Not indicated on this chart is that this system can not be confined to the individual hospital. It has to be accepted a responsibility of the hospital community, and I think it will be scandalous if there are examples of hospitals withholding information about their own experience when it’s important that that be shared with the rest of the professional community in order to anticipate emergent resistance, specific kinds of problems, [and] what needs to be done to clean it up.

“I suspect this will be mandated by government authorities. Before very long there’ll be systematic reporting of the incidence of nosocomial infection. There will be injustice. There will be hospitals, because they accept a higher proportion of compromised patients and practice invasive procedures more frequently, out of necessity will appear to get a black eye because they’ll have an unhealthier outcome; and there’ll have to be an important educational program to have and evaluate such statistics. That’s still being worked out at the present time, how to achieve that without doing undue injury.